Magic Lantern

One feature I skipped over with the Magic Lantern "hack" for your Canon T2i is bit rate control.  You can actually crank up the bit rate your camera records at and improve the quality.  It appears that the T2i likes 60 mbit/sec the best. Likewise you can actually lower the bit rate and get longer record times (up to 30 minutes potentially). I have to try this out.

Check out this link for a few videos that show the various data rates possible.

The Best Video Card for Motion

It's easy to get caught up in trying to make your system "Adobe CS5" ready,  or "Resolve" ready. Both of those involve the purchase of a second video card from Nvidia that will cost you $1,000 or more.  Premiere Pro CS5 and Blackmagic's Resolve both take advantage of Nvidia's CUDA technology.  But what if you're sticking to Final Cut Pro and do most of your graphics builds in Motion?  Eric St-Martin did some testing between ATI's 5870 and the Nvidia Quadro 4000 to see which comes out on top.

Who wins?  The ATI card.  It's not a surprising finding but it clearly creates two different camps for Mac Pro users and the video cards they stick inside.  If you want the best performance for Apple products, you're probably best sticking with ATI cards and specifically the 5870.  And hopefully, HOPEFULLY, down the road Final Cut will tap in to Apple's own OpenCL standard and the 5870 should scream even more.  But if you want to get the best performance for CS5 or Resolve, you have to go Nvidia.

The only middle ground seems to be that Blackmagic has certified with 5870's little brother, the 5770, as a "GUI" video card (meaning it can only be used to power the CPU monitors and not as GPU acceleration).  In some of the testing I've seen the ATI 5770 does a better job handling Motion than the Nvidia cards.  It certainly beats the Nvidia GT120, another Blackmagic approved GUI card.

To read more about Eric's testing, check out his site here.

Some Links

Some interesting links to peruse:

• Is Panasonic's AF100 hackable (ala the GH1)?  Maybe so, according to the original GH1's hacker.
• Fairly recently Magic Lantern added the T2i to its list of hackable cameras. This isn't a magical bitrate booster but instead adds a lot of useful features to the camera such as zebra stripes, crop marks (16:9, 4:3, etc), manual audio gain and many more useful features.  This of course carries a warning of USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.  If you're daring, check it out.
• Matt Jeppson is at it again with another great post about being careful what we wish for when it comes to the eternal quest for raw video.
• And @EOSHD (a great source for DSLR links) has linked to a comparison video showing the GH2 in its native AVCHD mode vs. the 40fps burst modes in 1080 and 3.8K modes. So yes you can shoot near-4K video with a GH2!  But for only 40 frames at a time (so not even quite 2 seconds if you edit in a 24p timeline). Not so useful at the moment, but maybe a hack in the future will take care of that?

Panasonic's AF100's Sensor Too Small?

Matt Jeppson over at FreshDV has a nice article up about the sensor size of the AF100, the latest AVCHD codec based camera from Panasonic.  The article covers just how much smaller the AF100's sensor is compared to the full-frame sensor found in the Canon 5D, but that it compares favorably to Super35 and the Red cameras.  Most interesting is when you compare the AF100, a sub-$5,000 dollar camera, with the Sony EX1 (a camera that sells around $6K):

The AF100 clearly surpasses (at least in terms of sensor size) the EX1, which was to date really the only affordable large sensor camera you could get your hands on. And it does all this without forcing you to make the myriad workarounds and concessions required when shooting DSLR.

Read the full article here.

Christopher Nolan Screenplays

This might be slightly off-topic for this blog but if you're in to shooting video, you're probably in to movies as well.  I'm a big Christopher Nolan fan.  I love the way many of this films are constructed in a non-linear fashion.  If you haven't seen "Following", do yourself a favor and rent it.  Anyway, the site nolanfans.com has posted all of Nolan's scripts in the PDF format.  Definitely worth checking out if you're a fan of any (or all) of his films.

You can find the scripts here.

Final Cut Server Gone?

Remember the only thing Apple seemed to talk about at 2009's NAB?  Final Cut Server MIGHT be history.  Hardmac (via 9to5mac.com) seems to think that Final Cut Server and Xsan, both apps utilized by many video professionals, might be the next to go in what seems to be Apple's purging of its server applications and hardware.  I DO NOT think this signals or should add fuel to the rumors that Apple will eliminate Final Cut. We have Steve telling us how "awesome" the next release is going to be.  But it is an indication that Apple is willing to give up on the server side of business and it will obviously impact post production companies down the road.  Oh, and it goes without saying, take this with a grain of salt. But since Apple's already cut Xserve it's not totally out of the realm of possibility.

Should I Work For Free?

Great chart by Jessica Hische on whether or not you should work for free.  Something all of us freelancers have had to decide at one time or another.

I The Pro Res Maker

I waited an entire day to watch this after seeing various links appearing on Twitter.  I don't know why because it's funny and worth your time since you're in to this whole video thing:

5" Sony Monitor

Sony's CLM-V55

Sony has introduced an affordable field monitor.  The CLM-V55 is a 5" monitor that plugs in to your camera via HDMI.  The price is expected to be around $399.  The resolution of the monitor hasn't been reported as of yet, but for the price I can't imagine it's anywhere close to 720p. One of the most affordable full 720p HDMi monitors out there is the SmallHD DP6 which sells for $899. However I imagine the pixel count will be high enough to aid in focusing.  We shall see.


For more information about Sony's CLM-V55, check out Pocket-lint's full write up here.

Undercity

I'm utterly fascinated with photos and videos about abandoned and underground places.  I love photos of ghost towns, abandoned hospitals and subterranean places like subways and tunnels.  There's a great video about the exploration of New York City's underworld over on Vimeo called Undercity.  If you haven't seen it yet, do yourself a favor and watch it now (even at its length it's more than worth it):

UNDERCITY from Andrew Wonder on Vimeo.

Reopening for Business

I'm going to resume blogging again and have decided to return to my Blogspot site (which is the one you're reading now).  More traffic still comes this way than my Squarespace page, so I might as well resume posting here.  I have an upcoming post coming comparing Premiere CS5 and Final Cut Pro 7 with editing AVCHD material. And I'll try and provide some random links (most of which you'll probably have already come across) soon. There have been a few cameras released since I last updated, including Panasonic's AF100 which uses it's "AVCAM" variation of the AVCHD codec.  So this codec is definitely still alive and doing well for the time being.

Also, I'm having difficulties importing in my Squarespace posts. One of their mantras is that you can go in and out of Squarespace easily.  However they output to a "Movable Type" formatted TXT file that Blogger will not import for some reason.  So if you're just coming upon this site, there's additional content here.

More to come, I promise.